Continuous adaptation is necessary just to maintain current fitness levels.
Van Valen's 1973 hypothesis, named from Alice: it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place. Sexual reproduction and the arms race with parasites are the biological cases.
In practice
- A firm that stops improving its product does not stand still; it falls behind because everyone else improved.
- A profession whose qualification was sufficient in 1995 requires continuous study now to hold the same relative standing.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- How knowledge grows, and how inquiry fools itself